Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use bourgeois in a sentence

40 example sentences · adjective, noun, verb

Bourgeois means of or relating to the middle class (often derogatory), and their presumed overly conventional, conservative, and materialistic values. Example: “It's about time we abandoned the bourgeois shibboleth that earning money makes you a better person.”

Examples of bourgeois by meaning

adjectiveOf or relating to the middle class (often derogatory), and their presumed overly conventional, conservative, and...

  • It's impossible to tell the story of flamenco without talking about Lorca, who found in it a source of inspiration in a lifelong political-cultural-sexual struggle against bourgeois philistinism.2010 February 5, Mike Marqusee, “Flamenco's humane roots”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 23 Jan 2023
  • The increasing social interactions between the two nations through religion, court and commerce would expose differences in speech too and would soon deepen bourgeois Scots’ deteriorating perception of their own tongue.2023, Clive Young, “chapter three: From Union to Devolution”, in Unlocking Scots: The Secret Life of the Scots Language, Edinburgh: Luath...

nounA capitalist, (usually derogatory) an exploiter of the proletariat.

  • Der Bourgeois sieht in seiner Frau ein bloßes Produktionsinstrument.1977 [1848], Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Marx-Engels-Werke; 4), page 478; English translation from...

More sentences with bourgeois

  • It's about time we abandoned the bourgeois shibboleth that earning money makes you a better person.From the entry shibboleth
  • “passing without passport” or “Slaves of the bourgeois class, daily and hourly enslaved”) .2013, Darko Suvin, In Leviathan's Belly: Essays for a Counter-Revolutionary Time, →ISBN. From the entry adnomination
  • Reds, sweeping aside the garbage of plutodemocracy, and dissolving the bourgeois parties, I remained stuck in France.2010, Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones: A Novel, page 506. From the entry plutodemocracy
  • Although traditional sins were allowed, colorful ones were considered bourgeois and banned.2009, Arne Kislenko, Culture and Customs of Laos, →ISBN, page 128. From the entry sinh
  • Eschewing liberal bourgeois notions of politics as compromise exposes this agonic or polemical quality of the political.2009, Christopher C. Robinson, “Theorizing as a Lived Experience: A Wittgensteinian Investigation”, in Wittgenstein and Political Theory…. From the entry agonic
  • In western Europe, the spirit of the bourgeois developed slowly towards a capitalist mentality.2006, José María Magone, The new world architecture. From the entry richdom
  • Behn had always associated the bourgeois with age, impotence, miserliness and dreary unflamboyance.2001, Derek Hughes, “Dearth and Famine”, in The Theatre of Aphra Behn, Palgrave Macmillan, →ISBN, page 160. From the entry unflamboyance
  • If she won't put out the men will accuse her of being bourgeois and uptight.1975, David Lodge, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, page 232. From the entry put out
  • The culmination of the Renaissance came about in a bourgeois pluperfection during the seventeenth century.1938, Seumas O'Sullivan, The Dublin Magazine, Volume 13. From the entry pluperfection
  • The burgher or bourgeois is, by definition, a town-dweller.2016, Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. From the entry town-dweller
  • Another victory for bourgeois righteousness and biofascist norms.2015, Mark Kingwell, Measure Yourself Against the Earth: Essays, page 72. From the entry biofascist
  • Saint-Simon was certainly a radical, and hostile to inherited privilege, but his bourgeois 'socialism' was of a patrician kind.2013 July 18, Doctor Martin Parker, Valerie Fournier, Patrick Reedy, The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization, Zed…. From the entry patrician
  • I suppose I haven't the breadth of temperament to appreciate the faults of genius: just a narrow-gutted bourgeois, I suppose.2012, Philip Larkin, Anthony Thwaite, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica. From the entry narrow-gutted
  • This might be a problem for you bourgeois people who think 'broni wawu' is undignified apparel, and therefore, beneath you.2008 September 19, Ato Kwamina Dadzie, “Ban 'broni wawu', face revolt”, in Modern Ghana. From the entry broni wawu
  • A propos te belles, savre-fous que l’être après timain que notre prital te bourgeois épouse la fille de monsir Goternitz?2004 [1743], Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated by Christopher Kelly, “The Prisoners of War”, in Letter to d’Alembert and Writings for the…. From the entry monsir
  • They emerge from this process as bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos.2000, David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise […] , Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 43. From the entry co-opt
  • From women, bourgeois gentilhommes learned how to comport themselves.1997, Grace Anne Morsberger, The Russian Woman Writer in the Salon: Issues of Gender and Literary Space, Berkeley, Calif.: University of…. From the entry gentilhomme
  • It's cheaper, it's outdoorsier, it's less exclusive, it's less bourgeois.1992 April, David James Duncan, The Brothers K, New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, ISBN 978-0-385-24003-1; republished New York, N.Y.: Dial Press…. From the entry outdoorsy
  • It was épater les bourgeois as a bourgeois calling.1987, Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's…. From the entry épater le bourgeois
  • The defeat of liberalism was also the end of bourgeois materialism in Germany, and its philosophical counterparts were neo-Kantianism and empiriocriticism.1978 [1976], Leszek Kołakowski, translated by P[aul] S[teven] Falla, Main Currents of Marxism, volume II: The Golden Age, Oxford…. From the entry empiriocriticism
  • Buttressed by clothes, walls and objects, there was the bourgeois family, the most mysterious institution of the age.1975, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital. 1848-1875, published 1995, page 278. From the entry mysterious
  • Larin's radicalism in particular, and the era's maximism in general, demanded that the old bourgeois be removed from industry entirely.1945, Simon Isaevich Liberman, Building Lenin's Russia, page 26. From the entry maximism
  • Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois.1933 December 1, Leon Trotsky, “Hitler’s National Socialism”, in The Yale Review, volume 23, number 2. From the entry particle
  • Besides, how they do love to “take a fall out of” the bourgeois–épater is their word for it.1919 June 8, “Intolerance at Zurich”, in The New York Times, →ISSN. From the entry take a fall out of
  • This rejection of anything connected with bourgeois democracy would later become associated mainly with ultraleft radicalism, but its beginnings were another matter.2011, Hal Draper, chapter 13, in Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, volume 1, section 1, page 284. From the entry ultraleft
  • Although we don't know exactly why Li is chosen to dance, we witness a man assuring officials that the child isn't from bourgeois stock.2009, B.P. Terpstra, Quadrant, November 2009, No. 461 (Volume LIII, Number 11), Quadrant Magazine Limited, page 2. From the entry grasshopper
  • Characteristically, the middle-brow novel was thus written for and by middle-class women, and could be stigmatised, to use Adorno's term, as a middle-class, bourgeois activity.1998, Judy Simons, Kate Fullbrook, Writing, a Woman's Business, page 35. From the entry middle-brow
  • On the Costa, a street full of gilders, carpenters, carvers, and stucco experts, their status as Inglesi—bourgeois as well as fine artists—set them apart.1996, Carolyn Burke, “Anglo-Florence (1907–10)”, in Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux…. From the entry gilder
  • Ambivalence toward the larger society even permeated the Reichsbanner. the only SPD fraternal organization that, on paper at least, embraced bourgeois republican groups.1993, Donna Harsch, German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism. From the entry fraternal
  • As sensitive artists and overcerebral intellectuals, feeling that they were unable to function in the social world — unlike the practical, sober bourgeois.1984, Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and .... From the entry overcerebral
  • But Cavaignac was not the dictatorship of the sabre over bourgeois society; he was the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the sabre.1978 [1850], Marx, Karl, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850”, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, volume 10, translation of original…. From the entry dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
  • This is why the theory of class consciousness characterizes such workers as privileged, as a labor aristocracy, as a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie.1974 [1972], Michael Velli with Lorraine Perlman, “III. Seizure of State Power”, in Manual For Revolutionary Leaders (Second Edition…. From the entry labor aristocracy
  • You, a poet, will understand when I say that the same relationship which exists between bourgeois art and art exists between militarism and martialism.1971, Paul van Ostaijen, Patriotism, Inc., and Other Tales, page 121. From the entry martialism
  • Without the dictatorship of the proletariat which is concentrated in the big cities, the bourgeois reaction will not be done away with.1962 [1852], Joseph Weydemeyer, “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, in Hal Draper & Horst Duhnke, transl., Labor History, volume 3…. From the entry dictatorship of the proletariat
  • Therefore, on the understanding that the essence of the bourgeois economy will be absent from the picture, we may call this system Guided Capitalism.1951, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Essays, page 182. From the entry guided capitalism
  • According to Engels, the bourgeois state does not “wither away”, but is “abolished” by the proletariat in the course of the revolution.1918, V. I. Lenin, “Class Society and the State”, in The State and Revolution, The “Withering Away” of the State, and Violent Revolution…. From the entry semi-state
  • Overwhelmed by the “tremendosity” of this problem, the bourgeois mind seeks to solve it by formulas more difficult than the problem itself.1908, Marcus Hitch, “Comments”, in Goethe’s Faust: A Fragment of Socialist Criticism, Chicago, Ill.: Charles H[ope] Kerr & Company, page 74. From the entry tremendosity

Meaning of bourgeois

  1. adjective Of or relating to the middle class (often derogatory), and their presumed overly conventional, conservative, and materialistic values.
  2. adjective Of or relating to the bourgeoisie, the third estate of the French Ancien Regime.
  3. adjective Of or relating to the capitalist class, (usually derogatory) the capitalist exploitation of the proletariat.

Full definition of bourgeois

Questions about bourgeois in a sentence

How do you use bourgeois in a sentence?
Bourgeois is used as an adjective, noun and verb. For example: “It's about time we abandoned the bourgeois shibboleth that earning money makes you a better person.”
What is a short sentence with bourgeois?
“Another victory for bourgeois righteousness and biofascist norms.”
What does bourgeois mean?
Bourgeois means of or relating to the middle class (often derogatory), and their presumed overly conventional, conservative, and materialistic values.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bourgeois (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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